117. Protect Your Energy in a Noisy World

Sometimes by sheltering the gory details about what happened with that person, you're offloading it. They can give you the same amount of support without vomiting. All that negativity and all those gory details onto that other person, and now they're experiencing the same exact trauma you did.

Are you a woman in medicine feeling overwhelmed and disconnected from the personal fulfillment that you desire? You're in the right place. Join doctors Joanne and Erin as they rewrite the rules for women in medicine. Let's begin.

In this episode, we will be talking about something very important and more serious than our usual topics. How do we protect our energy when there is so much negativity around us in the news, politics at work, social media, and in so many conversations, we really can't get away from it. Erin, I've heard you talk about filters to deal with this. What do you mean?

I mean, how can you put a barrier between yourself and what is in your environment? And there are many things that are out of your control. And what I hope we can talk about today is what are the things you can take control over that are going to make it so your environment is a more healthy, pleasant place to be, even despite what might be going on in your community in, as Joanne was saying in social media, in the news. And what are the, what are the places you need to shut down or turn the volume off? Like, if it's a hose of news coming in and it is a high volume, like a fire hose, can you turn it down so it's a little trickle? And that's what we're going to be talking about. How can you create a healthier filter? And one of the reasons this became so apparent to me was when I worked for 10 years in child abuse medicine, every day there were really disheartening stories that me and my team were exposed to. And because I didn't have control, that was the job I chose to do. I had to then change the filter of the rest of my world so that I could continue doing that work for a full 10 years? And that meant I had to stop listening. I couldn't watch the news. I had to stop listening to npr. I had to be very careful about the movies that I watched, the other conversations I had, and when we are sometimes surrounded by traumatizing information. For sure, during the pandemic, this was happening everywhere you looked. And yet we've, it feels like we're in another time where there's just one bad news after another after another. And so I would really like our listener to Pay attention to what's the volume of the negativity coming in, who are the people that you're around? And can we help you create a better filter or a healthier filter to manage that for you to be able to sustain long term?

This is so important. I love always saying be careful of what you feed your brain with. And there's things that we can choose. Like you're saying we can choose to turn the TV on or off or where, what news stations we go to in our, on our phone. But then there's so many other things that we can control. You might be just watching something funny or with a patient or with a family member. And then things come up and we don't. There's our need to talk about all the things that are coming up and it doesn't really matter because there's always something and it's easy to get stuck, stuck in that external information and then feel like you don't have responsibility about your thoughts or your emotions and how you react and in your future. And it's. I love what you're saying of kind of the using the volume. I love that analogy because sometimes we cannot make it go away completely, but we can lower the volume or maybe zoom out and look at other things. So it's not just the negativity that's right in front of us. And Erin, can you create a distinction and tell us why is this particularly important for women in medicine?

Many reasons. First and foremost, your job being exposed to patient care. For me, When I was in child abuse medicine, that was a sub specialty that was very traumatizing. You might find that if you're an emergency room physician, if you work in oncology, you know, if you work in areas of medicine, they all have potential exposure to very difficult circumstances or you might be exposed to hard conversations on a regular basis. And I would love for our listener to really own what is it that you're dealing with every day? And maybe things are going okay at work, maybe it's at home you're dealing with an aging parent or you have a child with chronic disabilities or chronic health problems that you're dealing with. So really taking an inventory like you were talking about Joanne, episode 114, you were talking about taking a mid year inventory. I'm going to encourage our listener take an inventory of what are all the heavy things you're dealing with right now and just give yourself credit for what you're dealing with. Working in medicine is hard. And when you can inventory and say what am I dealing with? Right now, what's different and how am I managing? Then you can do a better job of saying, okay, if I've got a fire hose of stuff coming at me because I work in a hard field such as oncology, where can I turn down the volume of negativity? And again, for me, I shut the news off completely. I have to balance. Where can I get a reasonable amount of news without it overwhelming me? And I rely on my husband because he's not affected the same way I am. And I had a client who was just. It was like this black hole and she just jumped right in the middle of it and just was consuming high volumes of the news and just getting so amped up. She wasn't sleeping at night and she was doing great things, going to rallies and things to let her voice be heard. Yet the negative part of that was she was so consumed and overwhelmed, she couldn't even take care of herself by getting a decent night's sleep. And she had other complex things to take care of in her life with her own family's issues and running a busy medical practice. And it. That recipe was not adding up for her. And so we have to be really careful. I talk about the recipe of our life, where what's going in right now. And depending on that, if you don't have the ability to filter out some of that part of it, maybe you have to figure out, how can I build more resilience or how can I lean into help in another way? And yet what you do have control over, I would encourage you to use that because simply adding fuel to that fire and just making it this raging inferno in front of you, it can get too hot and we have to cool it down.

So insightful of remembering what we can control and what we can't. And it. And there's a thin line. And I love what you brought up of expressing ourselves and letting our voices be heard and then also checking in. And of course, as a psychiatrist, I'm always thinking of what is that doing to your brain? What is that? How is it activating your nervous system? And are you getting back to ground then? Are you able to get some of that information and then still come back to a calmer self where you can get back to what's important and let other parts of your brain kick in and do what they're meant to do? And like you said, I like our fields are difficult even when we're doing good work, even when we love it. Like I always wonder of. And you know, I'm a psychiatrist I will never compare myself to an ear doctor or trauma surgeon or anything like that, but I sometimes wonder, like, what's going on inside my brain when I'm hearing so many stories back to back. Right. Or what you were sharing, Erin, of working in child abuse medicine for so long. And. And we don't necessarily notice it because we're. We're working, we're serving, we're coming from our hearts. But then it's even more important to really come back to center, to really come back to calming our nervous system and checking in. And again, like I always say, what are you feeding your brain and. And can you control some of that within the circumstances? Of course. And in talking about that, Erin, what are some things that we can do that can help? Like you're saying, protect our energy and deal with these filters?

Sometimes it's extremely simple. Um, one of the stories I shared with Joanne before we recorded. I'm wearing two bracelets right now for those of you watching on YouTube. They're very special to me. One was given to me by my son and my husband from a trip they took to Venice. It's got beautiful pink beads, and the other. So that reminds me of my family and the love from my family. The other is a very simple beaded pink and purple bracelet. That was one of the bracelets to choose from at the retreat I hosted in May. And each of the women chose a bracelet to take home. And that just by wearing this bracelet, it reminds me of the connection with these other very strong women in medicine, that collaboration, that friendship, that special bond we created, that special time together. And I can recreate that. I can bring it back just by wearing this bracelet, touching it, having it close, or even just seeing it with my jewelry. So you can have a tactile, tangible thing that comes with you, or maybe it's a certain piece of clothing that you can wear that really reminds you of the people that care about you or like it. A sweater that can be kind of your. Your protective sweater. Super simple. As I was saying, before we can decrease the volume, turn it from a fire hose to a small spigot, I'm going to watch only this News channel for 10 minutes. I'm going to read summaries of these things. I'm going to limit my social media and pay attention to how your body feels, how your mind feels, because as Joanne was alluding to, with your nervous system, if your job and your family and what you're taking in with all the negativity and you're running on cortisol24.7. No wonder you can't sleep. No wonder you can't think straight. We have to ask ourselves, what are we doing to fire up our parasympathetic nervous system? For me, I've talked a lot about meditation. That's been a thing that's helped me grounded with Dr. Tamberly. She talked about on her episode getting out in nature, literally grounding, getting your feet connected to the ground. Little tiny, simple things that sometimes you might need multiple ones to help. What do I have here? Being choosy about the timing of your exposure. So getting exposed to the news and social media right before bed, really not helpful. We need to be really careful about what we're thinking about before we go to sleep and our brain starts trying to make sense of our day and movement. I don't think we move enough. And so if you think about you're dealing with stressful stuff and you're sitting in front of a TV or a computer, can you move your body? Can you literally take Taylor Swift's advice and shake it off like animals do? Two ducks come in a fight, they turn their backs on each other when they're done, and they literally shake it off. Can we learn to put practice those? And then the last piece I'm going to share is secondary trauma. And there's different ways to share. If you had something rough happen, let's say you're an ER doc and you just had a really awful trauma that you dealt with and you need to unpack it, there's multiple ways to do it. And sometimes by sheltering the gory details about what happened with that person, you're offloading it. They can give you the same amount of support without. Then I call, like, vomiting all that negativity and all those gory details onto that other person. And now they're experiencing the same exact trauma you did when you were physically there witnessing all of those experiences. We can learn to filter how we pass off that information to others around us and also how we receive that. If somebody needs to offload to you, can we help structure those conversations so they're just as supportive and yet they don't cause as much secondary trauma. And I did this all the time in child abuse medicine, where I didn't tell them all the details of what I just heard from a child's story. But I might say, man, that was a really tough evaluation we did, you know, and maybe go on a walk and get rid of some of that energy. So these are just little ways and maybe finding what resonates with you, our listener. In order to create kind of a tool belt of ways that you can create a healthier filter by limiting what comes in, addressing how it comes in, such as again using physical movement, debriefing with other people, and then again, what's the timing and the volume of what you're taking in.

This is so powerful. I like to also add kind of again with my psychiatry hat on, kind of adding to what you were saying. It's that it's not just filtering the content, it's filtering the energy checking in. And whenever we're exposed to anything, really asking ourselves, how do I feel? Am I anxious? Is my brain spinning? Is it triggering other memories that are also negative? And sometimes we confuse feeling like it's important, like we're supposed to know. That's what I hear a lot. And the remembering important doesn't always mean urgent for what you need to absorb right now. So there might, like you were saying and choosing the timing because then it's also depends on what kind of day we've had already, what are our resources and then recovering inputs. I love you saying that there's something that's a little bit more specific, maybe it's almost therapeutic. A lot of these things we can take it back to cognitive behavioral therapy and a lot of psychotherapy, psychology, psychiatry concepts. And there's something called, it sounds funny, but it's cognitive inoculation and it's almost like an exposure therapy. So if you are really inclined to, if we're talking about the news or for example, if there's something that's work related, that, that you know that you're going to be exposed, limit the exposure as much as you can and then immediately after, after do something that's grounding. So that way you start retraining your brain of how it will react automatically to an exposure of the news or you know, or something that gives you anxiety. Again, these are more technical things, but we can use them even when we're at work and we see something that's really difficult and we obviously acknowledge the emotions, but then do something that's grounding that does not mean minimizing the emotion. That's what we learned to do. And that's part of the problem is almost the opposite is acknowledging it and then saying, okay, I'm safe, I'm grounded. And then using any of the things that you shared just to get grounded back. But you know, this is. Gets very personal and I love what, what you're saying and kind of going back to the Important things here, that things happen. And there's so many things that are going on in the world and you know, it doesn't matter your political views. There's things that are very difficult and so much that we are exposed to, whether it's what's going on outside or more internally. And then it's. I love what you said of turning down the volume and then choosing the filter also, that we see things through. Like, I love that analogy. I use it a little bit different, but similar in that I said, like, it's like you put on glasses and some can be kind of gray and things look darker, or you can literally put pink colored glasses or very clean glasses and then things look a little bit brighter. And again, never to minimize. It's just to very intentionally choose how we see things and what you mentioned of what you can control and recapping some of the things and some of the tools that Erin gave us. I love the idea of an ancar. I'm pronouncing that funny of having something you mentioned, something tactile. That's so powerful because again, if we train our brain, we touch it and that could be grounding. And then other things that we talk so much in here about in terms of meditation and gratitude and the nature, of course, all of that and being very specific about the time because we do want to be informed if there's something like that. And then the importance of going back to the basics like sleeping well and movement and it. This is so powerful. I think this is one of these topics that we're going to keep on revisiting because there's so much that we can expand on and so many tools that we can talk about and start implementing. And Erin, what's one piece of advice that you haven't given us or some nugget of information you would like to share?

One is if you have these tools available, like make it as easy as possible. And so, you know, having a go to, again, piece of jewelry that works for you, a go to something, a go to person. So thinking about these things ahead of time, so you have them at your. At your disposal. The other piece of information I want to share is something that Joanne shared with us on an episode quite a while ago. And it was about the immediacy of negativity. So you see something negative and it immediately creates a memory. And Joanne, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but then for positive things, it takes longer for that to be captured. And so just a reminder that for one negative thing, you may need to spend three times or five times longer in something positive to help counterbalance that. And also lingering in those positive moments, some patient just gave you a compliment. Put your hand over your heart, go. Wow. I really appreciate that. Thank you. And how many seconds is it? 10, 15 seconds, Joanne?

Yeah. 10 to 15. Yes.

To concrete that memory. And you need it there to overcome the negative things that are going on that may be out of your control.

That's so neat. Thank you so much. And I hope that you all took as many notes as I did and find these tools very helpful. And with that, please stay tuned because our next episode is coming right up.

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